An important aspect of the Christian faith is its strong grounding in history.  Geography plays an important part in that historicity.  Religion teachers often make extensive use of maps in their classes to give their students a sense of where the various places in the Bible were located in relation to each other and with respect to modern locations.  Unfortunately, a decent set of Bible wall maps, suitable for long-term classroom use, can easily cost hundreds of dollars.  In this week’s Web 2.0 Weekly, we’ll take a look at an online resource that you can use to leverage the power of Google Earth to show your students the geographic sites of the Bible.

Bible Geocoding (a project of OpenBible.info) provides Google Earth data for every identifiable location in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.  Additionally, the site provides map data for the rivers and other bodies of water from Scripture.  The location data is provided as a combined file, including all sites, or in several packages that allow you to display sites only from individual books or chapters of the Bible.  This level of fine control over what locations are shown makes this data very convenient for helping students see geographical patterns in the Scripture.  The utility of this information becomes even more evident when combined with Google Earth’s built-in tools to create custom map overlays and 3D tours.

One final, and very cool, feature is a collection of various maps of Jerusalem in Google Earth map overlay format.  You are able to place these overlays on the city of Jerusalem, and, with some tinkering with layer transparency, easily compare the ancient city to the modern one.  This is even more powerful when used to show students the 3D terrain of the city.

Making use of this data is as easy as downloading the files from OpenBible.info and opening them in Google Earth.

Strengths:

• Enormous amount of data provided in many formats
• Ease of use within Google Earth
• Map overlays provide an excellent tool for exploring Jerusalem

Weaknesses:

• No prepared information about Paul’s missionary journeys or the spread of the early Church
• Learning curve for Google Earth
• Google Earth requires fairly good hardware for best performance

The Bible Geocoding data is provided free for use under a Creative Commons Attribution license, meaning you are free to use it in any fashion provided you credit OpenBible.info.  To make use of it, you will need to download the latest release of Google Earth (5.2 at the time of writing) along with the selected data files from OpenBible.info.  I provided a link above to the official Google Earth system requirements, but it’s been my experience that running Google Earth on even machines matching the “recommended” hardware configurations can be painfully slow.  Processor speed plays a part in that, but I’ve found video memory and internet connection speed to be crucial.  Google Earth downloads information for the various layers you’ve selected on the fly as you navigate the map and change your apparent altitude.  Selecting all the available layers and going to a low altitude can bog down even a very fast internet connection.  Google Earth is officially supported under Windows, OS X, and some versions of Linux.

Google Earth also has a bit of a learning curve.  If you are not familiar with it, especially the newest version, allow yourself at least an hour to familiarize yourself with the various controls.  If you are new to Google Earth, be warned that it is very easy to spend hours just playing around with the various features and looking up interesting locations.

In addition to a computer and Internet connection, you will need some sort of large display connected to your computer to allow your students to easily see Google Earth.  This might be  a television, digital projector, or an interactive whiteboard.  If you have access to an interactive whiteboard, I strongly recommend it for use with Google Earth as you will be able to control the program from the whiteboard as well as annotate the display.